Trumping along with the Republican Party

I'm still waiting to see the third installment of Melanie Tannenbaum's three-part series on Donald Trump and the appeal of trashing so-called "political correctness."

But for today, here's Cenk Uygur on Trump, Fox News Has Lost Control Of Donald Trump The Young Turks 08/19/2015:

Matt Taibbi also used the Frankenstein's Monster analogy in Republican Assault on Trump May Only Make Him Stronger Rolling Stone 08/07/2015:

The Republican party and its allies at Fox, on afternoon radio and in the blogosphere have spent many years now whipping audiences into zombie-style bloodlusts. When it suited them, party insiders told voters across middle America that foreigners were trying to crawl through their windows to take their wives, and that stuffed suits in Washington and in the media were conspiring to enslave their children in Marxist bondage.

Now all of that paranoia is backing up on them. They created this monster, and it's coming for them now. Trumpenstein lives. He is loose in the town and on his way to the doctor's castle. We may not be laughing two years from now, but for the time being, man, what a show. [my emphasis]

Digby looks at one implication of Trump demagoguery in Were they wearing brown by any chance? 08/20/2015.

She also writes in Salon about a real "electability" problem for Trump and the other Republican contenders, Donald Trump is the harbinger of GOP doom: The devastating history lesson that Republicans are completely ignoring 08/20/2015:

It’s hard to imagine now, but from Harry Truman until Bill Clinton, California voted for a Democratic president just one time, for John F. Kennedy in 1960. [This is an error; Barry Goldwater in 1964 is the one that carried California between Truman 1948 and Clinton 1992 - Bruce] With a few exceptions here and there, California also voted for GOP governors and senators more often than not. Even though the state had a longstanding reputation for social tolerance and cutting-edge cultural change, politically speaking it was a conservative state, as red as Texas is now.

There were obviously many factors that contributed to California’s evolution into the deep-blue state it is today, from demographics to the culture war. But none of those things come close to the damage that then-Governor Pete Wilson did to the longterm interest of the California Republican Party in 1994, when he scapegoated Latino immigrants as the cause of all the state’s woes.

Wilson was running for re-election, and as part of his campaign to distract from the economic failure of his first term and increase turnout among his base, he ran on a platform promising to crack down on undocumented workers, and enthusiastically supported the infamous Prop 187, which set up a statewide system designed to deny any kind of benefits to undocumented workers, including K-12 education and all forms of health care.

Matthew Sitman writes in the The Difference The Donald Makes Commonweal 08/20/2015:

As a friend wrote to me, only half-jokingly, Trump is "the Hegelian synthesis of politics and entertainment." Which is to say that Trump is less a strange outlier than the cutting edge, a perfect candidate for this cultural moment. His impact has not been to create a space for serious but ideologically suspect policies, as Douthat hopes, but rather to foster a situation that's so detached from reality that Republican candidates can say nearly anything and have it go almost unnoticed. ...

Trump has turned the Republican primary into a (perhaps temporary) alternate reality where our already rather shabby expectations and standards for political argument matter even less than usual. In this farcical world, you indeed can proffer relatively good ideas with less risk of ideological policing. The problem is that, once you're in Trump's reality show world, what does a "good idea" even mean?